It’s funny when we get into a debate with a client about their own audience. We often find out in these situations how much both sides don’t know about the customer.

In these cases, we lean on both the statistical data and the experience we’ve collected and take a shot at running tests to see how close we can get. We usually get pretty darned close.

But what happens if the client isn’t willing to disclose certain information or the audience is not allowed to see the new interface design until it goes out to beta?

Design to the user.

It’s at the point where I say this in my sleep. I design user experience. It’s based on the user and their experience. End of story. I don’t design applications or Web sites or software UI to meet the specifications of a machine or a database. That’s left to the capable hands of the back-end development team.

What I expect them to return to me is the data the USER needs in order to make the EXPERIENCE as painless as possible.

Our lives are filled with applications that spit out millions of data points and while a user’s interaction is much more savvy on the Web than it was ten years ago, it’s not so savvy as to correctly guess at what they’re supposed to do without some sort of roadmap.

It’s still ok to hold hands and it’s still ok to give them a map.

Keep the user experience useful.

It seems appropriate to head into the Thanksgiving holiday with a post about my gut.

That gasping for breath was just me trying to get out of the Numbers application for a moment. You see, the large marketing ROI spreadsheet that should have been developed, discussed, battered and presented should have been done so by a CPA or a CFO or a CFML or a QWERTY or some other string of letters has been sitting on my desktop for about three months. It’s been collecting dust because I don’t need to look at the spreadsheet to know how things are going with certain pieces of the business.

And herein lies the issue: When I speak to the Marketing person for one of our clients, the first thing they ask for is our “set of numbers”. I don’t and couldn’t give numbers for something we have yet to produce, but I can give you one thing: my gut. My gut is a far more talented thing that can be used to sense evil like some gastronomic superhero. It can tell me when I’ve got less than a minute to answer to a question in a sales situation because the person to whom I’m giving a pitch is less than interested because they mistakenly used that 31 minutes on their Friday calendar (at 4:30 PM) to schedule our meeting.

My gut is powerful, but sensitive.

My gut can tell the future of certain events in user experience. It can sense when we’ve got a designer who is going down the wrong path and needs to be reigned in a little. And, of course, it can tell me when I’ve spent far too much time trying to “prove” something is working when we have an increase of 25% in sales for a customer’s online shopping cart.

The data is necessary. I’m happy to provide it when necessary (you know, when the actual work is complete, not before it’s been performed). It’s there to give us a progress report. It’s there to validate our gut, but it is absolutely not, I’m happy to say, there to replace it.

Try something new.

Working on a project with a large financial data corporation over this past year has taught me that even when your entire business model is predicated on a half of a percentage point, the data is only part of the story. It’s the general human behavior and experience and proper training that can teach you right from wrong.

You may not always enjoy success, but you should feel confident that you’re at least trying something new. Go over the numbers if you must on every single piece of minutiae, but don’t let it stifle creativity. Don’t let it stop you from proposing exciting and different ideas.

Take on the challenge of proving your gut is just as strong as the numbers.

As you return from your too-quick break, remember that the numbers on the scale are really not more important that the feeling of your gut.